Etro / Spring 2012 RTW

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Backstage just before her show, designer Veronica Etro, of the Etro dynasty, made a startling comment. “The prints we’ve done are so strong,” she said, “that you can’t really mix them.” In a season where a cacophonous clash of hothouse, Hawaiian, and hallucinogenic flora has created a pattern for spring (quite literally), Etro is taking a singular position on its prints. The house, like others here in Milan, has felt the call of the Deco twenties. Yet Veronica Etro has rendered the prints that transpired from it in a relatively clean way, streamlining their chevron and ziggurat motifs into a series of gorgeous flapper dresses, cut loose through the waist and falling into hems that fluttered with plissé layers, or as a border of slashed pleats, or ones that swished with silk fringing. Other dresses had pretty touches of dégradé fade out around the shoulders, so that the prints didn’t look too two-dimensional. “There are only dresses, really, few pants,” Etro went on to say. “And because they are so elaborate, you don’t really need any accessories.”

No accessories? From a Milanese designer? Etro had plenty, of course—flat envelope purses in graphic formations of claret, seafoam, and shell pink, and a rather snazzily jazzy gold-and-black kitten-heel sandal—but you get her point. In a city that’s no stranger to ladling it on, the look that is dominating many of the collections this season—the highly decorative dress that moves with softness and lightness, and doesn’t get much more adorned beyond that—delineates the new approach Milan is bringing to its usual concerns of exuberant artisanal handwork and detailing. The workmanship is still there, it’s just getting treated with a gentler, subtler, and—if this doesn’t sound oxymoronic (or even just plain old moronic)—more minimalist hand. That these prints accounted for this collection’s loveliest and liveliest moments is no surprise; they’re the company’s raison d’être, and Etro worked hard to take them far beyond a clichéd replay of Art Deco tropes, referencing, amongst other inspirations, the work of 1920s Italian Futurist painter Fortunato Depero. “Well, we’ve been doing them a long time,” she said, laughing. “Even back in the minimalist nineties!”